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David Gans

Known far and wide as the light behind the widely syndicated Grateful Dead Hour radio program, several books on the Dead and a number of intriguing CDs relating to the band and its music (see below), David Gans has been a musician, writer, radio producer, and photographer for more than 40 years.

As both a player and a journalist, he understands the transformative power of music – how it feeds our very life-force, bonds us together in obvious and unseen ways, teaches us, heals us, makes us better citizens of this fragile planet. "I came up in the time when we thought music could change world, and I still think it can – the only way the world can be changed: one soul at a time, by inspiration and example and not by coercion."

His writing career began at BAM magazine in 1976 with a piece on a "Russian Rock'n'Roll" band recently arrived in the Bay Area. He went on to write cover stories on a great variety of artists and producers, and he put his first-hand musical knowledge to work in music-tech pieces and interviews with songwriters, recording engineers, and inventors such as John Meyer and Leo Fender.

Gans joined the staff of M.I. magazine, published by Mix: The Recording Industry Magazine, and later served as music editor of the parent publication after M.I. folded. He joined the staff of Record (published by Rolling Stone) in time for its first issue and remained until its last, starting as the musical-instruments columnist and rising to the title of Senior Editor (West Coast) under the guidance of editor David McGee.

He has interviewed scores of artists, from new arrivals like Men at Work to monumental figures such as Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Randy Newman, Ted Templeman, and dozens more. He brought his camera along on his journalistic expeditions, and wound up with a pretty decent archive of photos, a sampling of which can be seen on flickr.

A chance meeting on a 1982 press junket to the Jamaica World Music Festival led to Gans collaborating with photographer Peter Simon on the 1985 book Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead. Promoting that book led to an appearance on the KFOG Deadhead Hour; David got hooked on radio and eventually was asked to take responsibility for the weekly program. When other stations asked if they could carry the show, Gans went to the Dead and received permission to syndicate it nationally.

Moving into radio put an end to Gans' music-journalism career, for the most part. He has done the occasional free-lance piece, most notably a 1995 profile of plunderphonics artist John Oswald for Wired, and he is currently at work on a critical work on the music of the Grateful Dead. "It's my field of expertise," he notes, hastening to add that being deeply into the music of the Dead has never prevented him from understanding and appreciating a great variety of musical styles. In addition to his syndicated Grateful Dead Hour, Gans hosts Dead to the World Wednesday 8-10 pm on KPFA 94.1 fm in Berkeley. "Two hours of unsupervised air time every week, and I can play whatever I think is good. And I get to have live bands in the performance studio several times a year."

Gans' Grateful Dead expertise has served him, and the Grateful Dead, well: he has produced several important archival releases, including the definitive boxed sets So Many Roads: 1965-1995 and All Good Things: The Jerry Garcia Studio Sessions. He also conceived and produced Postcards of the Hanging: Grateful Dead Perform the Songs of Bob Dylan; a covers compilation titled Stolen Roses: Songs of the Grateful Dead; and, with Henry Kaiser, The Music Never Stopped: Roots of the Grateful Dead.

Making his own music has been the top priority since the late '90s, when Gans began touring on a national level. His "solo electric" performances have taken him to festivals from coast to coast, and he enjoys the great intimacy (and economic advantages) of house concerts. He's been playing in a "Beatles jam band" called Rubber Souldiers off and on for the last several years, and in 2012 he started an acoustic Grateful Dead-ish band called the Sycamore Slough String Band.

"I never made a plan in my life," he humble-brags. "I just saw doors opening in front of me and went through them. The Grateful Dead are a weird-ass role model, but they taught me to be true to my muse, tell the truth, and go for it."